Calero is an editor of the Spanish-language monthly Perspectiva Mundial and a staff writer for the Militant, both published in New York. He was involved in a six-month fight against the U.S. government’s efforts to deport him. Last December, immigration agents arrested him at the Houston Intercontinental Airport while he was on his way home from reporting trips to Cuba and Mexico. Washington said it intended to send him back to his native Nicaragua because of a plea-bargain conviction 15 years ago, while Calero was in high school, for selling one ounce of marijuana to an undercover cop.

Under the mounting pressure of his defense campaign, the U.S. government dropped its effort to deport him in May.

The pickets told Calero about the challenges that they now face following U.S. factory owner Craig Smith’s decision to sell the company to a former manager, who hired 60 of the 90 scabs that Smith was using in order to avoid paying the locked-out workers any compensation. “He should take his union-busting back to America,” said Searle Owen, one of the locked out trade unionists.

“The main thing is that he is a boss doing what all bosses do—looking for ways to drive down wages and conditions,” Calero responded. “We have to figure out who we are up against—the bosses act together internationally to defend their class interests and we, who have a lot more in common as a class, have to act internationally too.”

Rol and Dewi Williams told Calero that the cops had raided the plant on one occasions to check up on scabs, who they described as “criminals” and “drug dealers.”

“These people appear to be taking our jobs,” Calero responded. “But the important point in all this is to always take the moral high ground. The labor movement must oppose any attempts to criminalize one section of the working class. The same cops who went to harass the scabs here recently will be used to harass union fighters like yourselves, tomorrow.”

Around 40 people attended a meeting called by the Róger Calero Defense Campaign at the Pathfinder Bookshop in London. Jane Evans, a member of the Communist League, a sister organization of Calero’s party, the Socialist Workers Party, described some of the recent attacks on immigrant workers, including the raid by 50 cops and immigration agents at the Cookie Man factory in Esher, Surrey. The aim of these types of attacks, she said, “is to drive immigrant workers down within the workforce, to scapegoat a section of the working class as part of their drive to divide and weaken all workers.”

She pointed to the resistance of immigrant workers, including 28 African refugees who set up a makeshift refugee camp in Brixton, South London, to highlight the refusal of state authorities to grant them benefits.

One participant at the meeting asked how other workers who are immigrants facing deportation and who don’t have the resources of a party, as Calero had, can fight to defend themselves. “I would say to them—it could be your party, too,” said Calero. “Secondly, there was no secret how this fight was won. We kept reaching out and found others who could be inspired by this fight, including in the unions, and also other people facing very similar situations to the one that I was in.”
 

Asif and others formed their group two years ago after mass protests on the Sighthill housing estate in Glasgow. The protests were organized in response to the racist murder of a Kurdish worker. Earlier this year they heard about Calero’s fight from Lawrence Mikesh, a spokesman for the Calero defense committee who lives in Miami.

The rally chairperson welcomed Calero to the event, and reported that the Scottish TUC had backed his fight.

Several participants were keen to hear Calero describe his case and to tell their own story. Katawandja Djuma, from the newly formed Scottish African Refugee Community Association, said that his organization had been formed in response to racist attacks against African immigrants on the Springburn estate. “A jail is a jail,” he told Calero, as they discussed a view put forward by some involved in the September 6 protest that what is needed is a more “humane” way to detain asylum seekers.

The previous evening Calero had spoken to eight of his defenders at a meeting in the Bathgate Trades Union Centre in West Lothian. A former vehicle worker said that while he was pleased Calero had won, he thought that he and his party—the Socialist Workers Party—were fighting a losing cause. Another participant disagreed, saying, “we need a movement to win.”

Calero discussed the lessons of his antideportation struggle. “We’re losing too many battles today,” he said, “but my fight and others show that we can win.”

Also speaking was Pamela Holmes, who said that members of her organization, the Communist League, have recently established a unit of the party in Central Scotland. They have made the defense campaign an important part of their work, she said. The meeting raised £162 campaign expenses and future defense efforts.

In Glasgow, Calero met up with four members of the Volunteer Tom Williams Republican Flute Band. Band members, who are of Irish descent, had earlier endorsed and publicized Calero’s fight. They described the ongoing anti-Irish discrimination in Scotland. Some had joined a 60-strong picket outside the Glasgow City Chambers July 23 at a civic reception for the rightist Orange Order, which supports British rule of Northern Ireland.

The flute band’s web site will be opening a new features section with a piece on Calero’s victory along with the story of Ciarán Ferry. Ferry is a former Irish republican prisoner presently facing a deportation order in a jail in Denver, Colorado. The threat “is an attack on the rights of all those who live and work in the U.S., and it’s an example of how the attack on immigrants is the spear point of the assault on all working people,” Calero said.  
 
 
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